


Tremor

by Polly_Lynn



Series: The "Unnamed" Series [7]
Category: Castle
Genre: Angry Sex, Angst, Angst and Feels, F/M, First Love, Friends to Lovers, Male-Female Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 22:36:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4155591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: "She wouldn't have thought he had it in him. Softness. She wouldn't have thought him any more capable of it than she is, and she wonders if she might've been more careful, had she known. With him and with herself. But he tells her Kyra Blaine is the one who got away, and the last thing she wants to be is careful."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tremor

**Author's Note:**

> One shot AU for "A Rose for Everafter" (2 x 12). Chronologically

  

She's trying to find her footing. Not so much solid ground. Not so much smooth, unbroken terrain. That isn't them. It's never been them. But this upheaval has been sudden and violent—entirely new facets of him exposed in a moment—and purchase is hard to come by.

_You two know each other?_

_That would be an understatement._

She tries to carry their usual routine alone. What feels like it, anyway. She sticks the knife in. Sly jabs, about what Kyra is and what she's not, every single flick not quite softened with a wicked smile that he overlooks.

_Softened_

That's never been them, either. Blade and steel. One keen edge drawn along another, the end result something sharp. Sparks along the way and blood drawn, more often than not. A map of scars vast enough to span the canvas of two skins.

She wouldn't have thought he had it in him. _Softness._ She wouldn't have thought him any more capable of it than she is, and she wonders if she might've been more careful, had she known. With him and with herself. But he tells her Kyra Blaine is the one who got away, and the last thing she wants to be is careful.

She finds the two of them—Kyra and _just Rick—_ tangled up in the kind of awkward moment love stories turn on. A deserted ballroom. A twisting forest of sky-high centerpieces. The would-be bride blushes. He, absurdly, holds a piece of cake. The air is thick with possibility. What might have been and what might yet come right after all these years.

She finds them like that. She says his name, a sour note sounding.

_Castle._

 

It takes him a moment to turn, as if he doesn't recognize it. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe here, he really is _just Rick._

She's an intruder here. Unwelcome, and nothing could be clearer than that. Still it's Kyra who leaves, ceding ground only when she's good and ready. Taking the magic—the _potential_ —that windsthick around the two of them with her when she goes. It's Kyra who could have turned the moment another way, at will as he stands ready. Her wind-up knight, staring after her.

She sees the chinks in his armor, and it feels like betrayal. All those vulnerable places he ought not to have. It feels like she should despise him for it.

* * *

 

She tries softness. She plays at it. She tries to be a shoulder to him. A still tongue and a ready ear. She tries to be the things friends ought to be to one another.

_Friends_

The word is the blade turned inward. Far too many corners and shadowed places—cold things, rough things, pressed against her back or his thighs—give lie to it. Far too many times nothing at all has happened.

_Lovers_

It hisses through her mind, once and only once. She tries softness, and he looks right past her. Right _through_ her to Kyra. The damsel in distress, and there's Greg shaping up into a fine villain.

He looks right through her, and she's steel again, tempered now. Harder and left cold. She tells him a story all too easy to believe. The story _he_ should be telling. The one he shouldn't be able to keep behind his teeth.

_He would paint a picture about the night before the wedding. About how Kyra couldn't fall asleep and so she went down to see Greg . . ._

She cribs from him. Cadence and gesture and posture. The tilt of her head and the rise and fall of vowels, all stolen from him.

She tells the story she wants to be true, but he doesn't hear it. He doesn't react at all. He leaves her standing alone.

She orders surveillance.

* * *

 

Her phone buzzes. Her hands are stiff. Her elbow and wrist awkward and strangely locked as she jerks the thing to her ear, as if she knows the evil of it already.

_Beckett_.

She must say that. Her name. She must say enough to keep the details coming. To know the surveillance team already has the shots uploaded and ready for review. To know he's with her on a rooftop.

_You make the stars shine._

Habit moves her fingers over the keyboard. Muscle memory as she travels from desk to printer and back again. As she works methodically through the stack, hardly slowing. Seeing nothing at all, until the shape of him appears.

He's an eager blur, shouldering through that door. It's painful to see him advance, frame by frame, the distance between them evaporating like years. Excruciating to see his arms around her, and then . . .

_And then._

She calls it fury—cold and hot and cold again. God knows the word goes alongside his name often enough to sound true. It drives her from her desk to the January night. It carries her through streets so familiar it's hardly navigation.

It drives her right to his doorstep.

There's no reason they should converge there. None at all, but she pushes through the stairwell door, and he's there. Just pulling his key from the lock. Turning at that exact moment, as if he expects her, when there's no earthly reason he should. No earthly reason this shouldn't have ended with her staring at the blank expanse of his front door, realizing it's the middle of the fucking night, and she has nothing like an end game in mind.

But he turns. He catches his keys in his palm and shoves them in his pocket. He closes the gap between them. Or maybe they both do. They collide.

"What the hell were you thinking?"

It's barely out of her mouth. It might as well not be for all the attention he pays. He has her up against the wall, fingers biting into her arms even through her heavy coat. He has his mouth on hers. A fierce, _demanding_ kiss he has trouble tearing himself away from.

"Why are you here?"

His voice is ragged and low, his lips a fraction of an inch from hers and he can't help himself. He touches them to the corner of her mouth, his tongue coaxing hers to part, the sweet patience of it at odds with the rigid anger that travels from his frame to hers. She sags against the wall. Sharp contact with the base of her skull that jolts something painful to the surface.

He tastes like her. Like Kyra.

She shoves at him. Tries to raise the folder of surveillance shots between them. Tries to remember she's blindingly angry, but he tears it from her hand. The stiff cardboard slices across her palm. She cries out.

His demeanor changes instantly. He raises her hand to his mouth, his thumb hovering over the cut as he breathes an apology into it. He softens, though the knuckles of his free hand are white around the edge of the folder.

"No," he says, not quite gently. "Not this."

"Not _her?_ " She pushes at him again, drawing anger up from the pit of her stomach, past the mess of everything else.

His jaw twitches. Another sudden tilt of the earth beneath their feet, and it makes her heart leap. Some kind of black twist of satisfaction, anticipation, and fear. He presses her harder into the wall. Drops her hand and makes a sudden fist in the hair at the nape of her neck.

"Not. Her." He forces her eyes to his. Raises the folder high and close enough that its edge almost brushes her cheek. Close enough she sees the faint smear of her own blood, a peripheral blur. "Not _this._ Why . . ." He kisses her again. A rough demand that's far kinder than his softness. "Why are you here? Right now. _Why,_ Beckett?"

_I don't know_

The words swell and fill her mouth, but it's no answer. Not a syllable stirs the air. She tips her head back. Lets the weight of it sink against his knuckles. She parts her lips and sweeps her tongue along his. Every trace of her is gone. _Kyra._ The name hardly echoes, even in her mind.

She opens her eyes and he opens his. Wide, and the shock there is a mirror for her own. He's as startled as she to find there's suddenly, pointedly no one but them in this hallway. In this particular fucked up time and space.

_What is this?_ _What_ is _this?_

More words that aren't, bubbling up, but he sees them. He knows the lines of her resistance and loses no time. He circles her wrist with his fingers and bands his arm around her waist. He kisses her. Disarms her completely and pulls her with him, though it hardly needs doing, each caught in the other's orbit as they are.

The creak of the door handle startles her. The angry rustle of abused cardboard as he fumbles with it. She tugs herself back, one step away from the threshold. Two. Into the hallway, and his arm drops to his side, the white edges of the shots themselves tipping beyond the corner.

"No." He leans his weight back, forcing the door open and open. He shakes his head. "Not . . . not another hallway." He takes a step back. Breaks the threshold, his head bowed, his voice steady for all the pain lancing through it. "Not another . . ." He looks up at her, pleading, though he doesn't want to. "Not another fucking shadowy corner, Beckett."

She's no match for it. The longing and hurt in the too many steps opened up between them. She closes the gap. Or maybe they both do.

The folder flutters to the ground. The door shuts with a click behind them, and everything is slow motion. His hands in her hair. The tug of hers at his coat. His scarf in her fist. He backs her into the doors just off the loft's entryway. Her heels, her elbows, the flat of one hand. They all connect at once. A sharp report, _loud_ in the dark of the loft.

_"Castle!"_ She gasps at the sudden, heart-stopping realization of where they actually are. That his _family_ is asleep upstairs.

She tries to push free, but his hands are unrelenting, shoving the hem of her shirt upward and skimming his fingers along her waistband. Baring her.

"I don't care," he murmurs, his teeth at her shoulder as he jerks her chin back around, tearing her gaze from the stairs, training it on his own. "I don't _care_."

"Castle, _please_ ," she groans. A last-ditch plea that goes wrong. He reaches behind her. The creak of another door handle and everything giving way. Blind panic as some still-capable part of her mind puts it together. His bedroom. It's his _bedroom._ "I can't."

The words are nothing but the thinnest of threads. Still they jerk them back. They tear him from her. He holds his hands high and wide, but she gives chase, still tugging. Raising up to kiss him. To shoulder through what he _thinks_ to what she really means.

"Not . . . Castle." She opens her mouth over his, pouring all the hunger of her body into the kiss. "Not some hallway." She presses herself to him. "But not . . ."

She lets go with one hand, fingers fluttering toward the handle. He gets it. Hangs his head, exasperated, angry, and _hurt_. She sees it all, though she hardly needs to. She knows this is what they've trailed behind them since this started. Since the first time it never happened.

But it bleeds out of him as he raises his eyes to hers again. He nods. Acquiescence as he winds his arms around her. "Not . . ." he whispers as his mouth hovers close to her cheek. "Ok. _Ok."_

She drifts with him. Backwards. Turning, now. Shuffling forward. Dropping his coat and her own over the back of the couch as they pass. His shirt dangling from the crook of her elbow. Turning. Pausing. Arching into him and away from the press of sharp corners and unforgiving surfaces. Teeth scraping skin and closing around it. Wordless protest—or maybe encouragement, maybe urgency—as he sucks hard just barely below the neckline of her shirt and she feels blood answer his call.

He eases the office door shut. Everything spills from his arms. From hers. Belt and scarf. His shirt, hers quickly following. More than all of it with the soft slide of fabric. Anger and hurt waft down and away, because this is different. Space to move in. Quiet that belongs to them and air that feels familiar, even as it hits newly bare skin.

She feels like she's falling as he lays her on the thick carpet. Feels like her eyes are open wide and every sensation is keener. More cutting. The white painted brick rises high and far away. Gold streetlight pierces the glass, fascinating as it falls over her hand. Her nails making a half-moon treasure map in the bare skin of his shoulder.

"Kate."

He moans her name—too loud—as he sinks into her, finally. Too _loud,_ and she claps her hand over his mouth. He blinks at her, startled, then smiling from behind it. His eyes crinkling up at the corners as he nips at her palm, careful of the long, stinging cut slashing across it. It's sweet. Intimate.

It's too much.

It _hurts._

Her head falls to the side, her clenched fist slamming into the carpet, stretched high above. She writhes. Struggles beneath him for leverage. For purchase. She arches up against him, but he's all softness again. Insistent, but not struggling with her as his lips travel down her throat. As he presses the warmth of his open mouth to her skin.

He punctuates the slow rock of his hips with teeth at her breast. His tongue spirals out, lapping gently, then sucking hard at her nipple, then lazily at smooth skin, here and there. He coaxes her back to him. Her body. Her _attention,_ until she's shivering with it. Crying out as she twines her calves around his, pulling him closer. Greedy for the feeling of him. Too close to howling, and he knows just when to seal his mouth to hers, quieting them both as he drives hard, one last time.

He rolls from her body. Her chest rises with the weight removed. With the _implications_ of it all crowding into her mind. Them. Here. Like this. Her chest rises.

"Stay," he says to the ceiling. "I know. I know it's . . . . this is . . ." He takes a shaky breath, pulling in air like it hurts. It might well. Everything else does. "But can you stay for just a little while?"

His fingers creep sideways to tangle with hers. The touch calms her. Calms him. It hurts a little less.

"I can stay." She says it to the ceiling, too.

* * *

 

It's not long. He's silent and she is, but they hold each other's fingers tight and rise together without a word when it's time. When they both know it's time.

He doesn't help her dress. He hands her things and looks away, stepping into his own. Strange modesty with his marks covering her body. Hers covering his.

He tucks her into her coat, though. Faces her and slips her arms in one by one, tugging it closed and taking care with each button.

The sight of the folder on the floor, the surveillance shots fanning out, stops them both. She stoops to gather them up.

"I know you told me . . . " He speaks quietly. Trails off. "I know that I shouldn't have gone. I'm sorry."

She stands, swiftly turning to face him. She wants to ask what it means. If he's sorry he got caught or sorry he went. She wants to ask him so many things, but the ground has shifted beneath them more than enough for now.

She slides her arms around his waist, instead, something easing in her chest when the folder is out of sight. She drops her head against his shoulder and whispers _I know_ into his neck, even though she doesn't.

She doesn't know at all.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This is sixth in show chronology, the ninth I've written in the series.


End file.
